The city’s long-standing failure to ensure basic public safety corrodes confidence in City Hall. It segregates the community into pockets of order and disorder.

It hurts Stockton’s other crying need: jobs. Imagine when potential employers Google Stockton and find it is California’s third most dangerous city.

Not to mention the Cleveland schoolyard massacre of 1989. A community subject to such horror has every right to support solutions.

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed a gun control measure for the 2016 ballot. Newsom’s politically courageous measure would ban clips that hold more than 10 rounds.

It would require sellers of ammunition to conduct on-the-spot background checks and deny ammo to felons, violent misdemeanants, people with restraining orders against them or the dangerously mentally ill. And other steps.

There are valid arguments in favor of the contemporary interpretation of the Second Amendment (there’s also a lot of pseudo constitutional scholarship, and some strangely perturbed anti-government sentiment).

But I don’t agree with those arguments.

Outside the law, argument number one is self-defense. The reality: A gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used to kill or injure in a domestic homicide, suicide, or unintentional shooting, than to be used in self-defense, according to the Brady Campaign to Stop Gun Violence.

We saw that in Stockton on Oct. 19. Marcus Smith, 20, was cleaning a .22-caliber firearm in his garage when the gun fired and struck him in the face.

Smith’s mother saw it happen. He died.

When I was police beat reporter, I wrote many such stories. The most heartbreaking involved little children.

On the other hand, if you’ve used a gun in self-defense, I want to hear from you.

That said, I believe that the National Rifle Association has skewed Americans’ interpretation of the Second Amendment. I don’t hold this against them, exactly. They did what the supporters of same-sex marriage did: lobbied, litigated and persuaded until a majority of Americans came around to their point of view.

But gay marriage was a social evolution toward equal civil rights for an oppressed minority. The unregulated right to own firearms is no such thing. Gay marriage cannot kill you.

Guns certainly can. On average, 31 Americans are murdered with guns every day and 151 treated for gunshots. The Oregon college shooting was the 994th mass shooting in America in the past three years. The U.S. gun homicide rate is 20 times higher than the combined rates of 22 countries as populous and wealthy as America.

That is a crisis, camouflaged as the high ground of constitutional rights.

Here in Stockton, there have been 37 homicides this year. And 99 people shot. In some neighborhoods, gunfire is a nightly sound. Parents forbid children to play in front yards.

James Gorman Jr., 30, was shot dead when he confronted two teenagers who had robbed his children. Jermaine Finister, 33, when he tried to help a friend in a fight. Jerry Lucero, 43, in an attempted sandwich shop robbery. Rashawn “Ray Ray” Harris, 13, while he stood in his driveway, waiting for the bus to school.

The good news is that murder in Stockton has been decreasing over the past few years. Credit police staff increases and gang intervention programs such as Peacekeepers. But the murder rate is still half again bigger than Modesto’s.

Until the bankruptcy, gun violence was Stockton’s marquee dysfunction. But a city can put bankruptcy behind it. Gun violence rages on. It will until you say enough.

— Contact columnist Michael Fitzgerald at (209) 546-8270 or michaelf@recordnet.com. Follow him at recordnet.com/fitzgeraldblog and on Twitter @Stocktonopolis.